1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and an image forming system.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years has been provided an image forming apparatus that is composed of an image forming section to form an image on sheets, and a sheet finishing section to perform sheet finishing, such as punching processing, stapling processing, and bending processing, to the paper on which the image is formed by the image forming section.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. Hei 4-142993 discloses a copying machine provided with a page inputting section to specify an arbitrary page and a control section to perform the control of binding the sheets up to a specified page every specified page in order to enable binding processing at every bundle at the time of outputting a plurality of bundles of sheets of paper, as such an image forming apparatus.
Furthermore, an image forming apparatus having the functions of printing page numbers, performing layout processing, and the like, in addition to the sheet finishing, such as the stapling processing and the bending processing, appeared. Among such image forming apparatus, there is an image forming apparatus capable of changing the settings of image forming conditions by the plurality of sheets of paper, by the job, by the plurality of pages, and by the page.
Moreover, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2004-287411 discloses an image forming apparatus dividing a plurality of original documents into a plurality of groups to perform image formation of all of the groups in accordance with the image forming conditions that are set by the group, and an image forming apparatus setting at least one of a layout, information addition, and sheet finishing to predetermined pages of the whole documents composed of a plurality of pages as a second image forming condition different from first image forming conditions pertaining to the whole documents to perform image formation of the predetermined pages in accordance with the second image forming condition.
However, in such a conventional image forming apparatus, if the function of adding front covers or of forming only the image of the first document page on the sheets which is different from that of the other document pages (front cover setting) is set for documents composed of a plurality of document groups, each group including a plurality of document pages, then the front cover setting is performed only to the first document page of the first document group. In order to perform the front cover setting to the first document pages of all of the document groups, a user has to perform the front cover setting every document page or every document group, and that is a troublesome operation for the user and the usability of the conventional image forming apparatus is not good.